“Heaven’s On Fire,” the second track on The Radio Dept.’s flawless new full-length Clinging to a Scheme, begins with a primal summation of all that the Radio Dept. seek to represent. A sound clip of a reporter asking Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore is heaped on top of the slow undercurrent set forth by the first song, “Domestic Scene.” The exchange between the reporter and Moore reads like this:

Reporter: People see rock ’n’ roll as youth culture and when youth culture becomes monopolized by big business what are the youth to do? Do you have any idea?

Thurston Moore: I think we should destroy the bogus capital process that is destroying youth culture.

Emphasis on the word “destroy.” And the sound clip, at once perplexing and entirely fitting, proffers a myriad of questions: Are The Radio Dept. endorsing Moore’s philosophy? Is this quote still culturally and artistically relevant? If so, what is the context and how is it applied to the currently socio-political environment? And hasn’t youth culture been monopolized by capitalism to the point of nonextraction? All questions, however, are erased in the split-second it takes for the song to properly begin. After the slow, hypnotic beat of album opener, “Domestic Scene,” “Heaven’s On Fire” allows that all bets are off; the Radio Dept have arrived and they need your love, not your intellect.

“Heaven’s On Fire” is the ushering in of a more assured, perfunctory, and upbeat sound for the band. After a slew of releases that rarely rose above 60 BPMs, Clinging to a Scheme fells like a coming out party. “This Time Around” and “Never Follow Suit” both make good use of syncopated keyboards and their driving bass lines burrowed below single, distorted guitar lines. Even the horn punches in “Heaven’s On Fire” feel eerily natural as they fill in the gaps left by the absence of melody.

The band act less like anthropologists on Clinging to a Scheme and more like innovators who have synthesized their findings and talents into one great cohesive thesis. Distilling the best elements from European goth and pop brethren like The Stone Roses, The Cure, and Joy Division, The Radio Dept. are intelligent enough to throwaway the less accessible elements of their influences and emphasize the rest. All the fuzzy guitar lines from The Stone Roses and The Jesus and Mary Chain, the underwritten melodies of The Cure, and the subdued urgency of Joy Division are there, but without the constant parade of melancholia and obsessive lyrical substance. The Radio Dept. are more at home with lines like “please accept this token/ of my sincere gratitude/ I’m not joking” than with lines like “it doesn’t matter if we all die.” The closest they come to lyrical urgency is in the chime and keyboard trickle of the shoegaze ballad, “David — a song where the namesake spends “20 years” with the feeling of “being lost inside.” But even then the urgency isn’t in the lyrics, it’s in the way the music feels both unhurried and burning at once; a swell of emotions tampered by a rational mindset.

As much as I have loved The Radio Dept. for some time now, my concern was always that they would be swallowed whole by their brand of dream/twee pop rather than work to expand its confines. I’ve never been happier to be proven wrong. Earlier albums and EPs demonstrated their fascination and appeal to “youth culture” as it were — after all, this is the same group that proudly once displayed lyrics like, “I don’t need love/ I’ve got my band” — and the album’s curious cover photo and oddly compelling title indicate that they still recognize that nostalgia is a valuable currency. But, with songs as infectious as these and an album that tugs at both the heart and the head, I want to live within those moments of song the band creates. And I want appreciate them through the lenses of adulthood, while yearning for days of teen angst which is exactly, I believe, where The Radio Dept. want us to be.